


Haunted

by cassakleia



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Ruining Derek's Life, Established Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Ghosts, Happy Ending (mostly), M/M, Major Character Death (kind of), Sad Derek Hale, Stiles is Missing, Tags Contain Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 15:31:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4397321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassakleia/pseuds/cassakleia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek isn't sure what it is. A ghost, an echo, a hallucination from Derek's grieving mind. He can still hear Stiles' voice some days, and it's begging him to find Stiles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haunted

_“Derek... Derek!”_

Derek looks empty space, phantom laughter echoing down the hall.

 

Derek doesn't know where Stiles is. But then, nobody does. The sheriff has searched everywhere in town. The pack has tracked his scent in endless, meandering loops. Stiles vanished four months ago, like a sick, twisted magic trick. Now you see him, now you don't. (But you hear him sometimes, from his side of the bed, whispering familiar words in a familiar tone; a soothing, unsettling cadence.)

 

_“_ _Come find me,”_ a voice whispers into his ear, breath cool against Derek's skin. He forces his eyes to stay shut and pulls the blankets up to his nose.

 

“Maybe you should leave the house for awhile,” Scott tells him. If even Scott says so, the situation must be dire. Derek doesn't know how to respond. He stayed in the burnt out husk of his family home for years. He decides on a shrug, because he doesn't have the strength to leave another empty home, nor the strength to argue about it.

 

“Why don't you come over for dinner,” the sheriff says. So Derek does, often, seeking solace with the one man who understands. Scott hurts, but not like Derek and the sheriff hurt. It's not all-encompassing; Scott's world keeps turning. The sheriff and Derek always eat in near silence. Neither man ever had to worry about filling a silence. The sheriff leaves the TV on for background noise, a poor distraction from the lingering traces of that scent from the room upstairs. Dinner with the sheriff is where Derek is decidedly not okay, and that's okay. It's the only time Derek can breathe.

 

_“_ _Please,”_ someone whispers. _“Please, Derek.”_ Derek grabs some headphones off his nightstand and goes for a night jog, running himself to exhaustion. When he returns, he collapses into bed. His ears pick up no sound, but as he's falling asleep he feels a cold presence against his back.

 

“I could move in with you,” Isaac offers. Derek reacts poorly. He loses control, breaks the coffee table, smashes a lamp against the wall. It's the worst, because Isaac is terrified but supportive and in the end Derek feels like a huge asshole. Isaac soothes him, tells him all sorts of logical reasons for him to move in. They're too well thought out, Derek thinks. The pack must have been discussing it. Derek stays in this big empty house all alone, with more rooms than one couple needs, because the pack loves—loved—to stay over and _Derek, we might needs more rooms one day, yeah?_ Isaac shoots Derek a pitying glance as he leaves. Derek hates it. He knows Stiles might not—is not coming back. He's not in denial. He is not.

 

_“_ _Find me, please.”_ Derek slides his eyes shut. _“Derek, it's cold. Please.”_ Stiles hates the cold. He always shoves his way into Derek's space, stealing warmth like he's coldblooded. Or he did. Stiles did, Stiles used to, Stiles doesn't anymore. Derek is not in denial. He opens his eyes and says, “Help me find you.”

 

“I hear him,” Derek confesses. To Deaton, of all people. But Deaton is the least likely to give him a pitying look, and the most likely to have something to help. Deaton hums.

“What does he say?”

Derek flinches. He says a lot of things. He laughed when Derek burnt an entire breakfast meal, the eggs, the pancakes, and even the toast. He greets Derek at the door anytime he returns. He murmurs reassurance into Derek's ears at night. But most of all...

“He wants me to find him.” Derek's voice barely breaks. It's something to be proud of, he supposes. No one thinks Derek is okay, or expects him to be, but Derek still hasn't lost the instinct to hide his pain.

“With the world we live in, I can't say whether or not this is a true apparition,” Deaton tells him. “I don't particularly want to find out, either.” Stiles' disappearance affected Deaton in his own way, Derek guesses, even if Deaton appears to be the same. “What I can tell you is that your mind may be settled if you do as he says.”

“You can't just give me something to make it go away?”

“Magic isn't a solution for everything.”

Derek storms out. Deaton, unhelpful as always. He's not sure why he expected anything else. It's not until an hour later, when Derek calms down, that he realizes how stupid it was to get angry. Deaton gave him okay advice. Advice to get the ghost to leave, which is what Derek asked for. That's what Derek wants. It is.

He punches a wall to feel his fingers break. It backfires when, seconds later, he feels his hand enveloped in a cool burst of air.

 

Derek feels the cold seep off of him in the direction of the door. It brushes his left side, pulling him to the car. Derek's hands tremble against the steering wheel. He convinces himself that it's from the cold touching the left or right hand when it's time to turn, but he's not quite successful. He drives for two hours, with the ghost of Stiles right next to him, if not literally than figuratively.

By the time he parks, in front of a dilapidated but otherwise nondescript house, he's shaking so hard it's visible. Derek is terrified; terrified this is real, terrified it's fake, terrified he'll find closure and Stiles will leave, or he'll find nothing and be haunted forever. The ghost runs air through Derek's hair, but the gesture that would be comforting from Stiles is unnerving from an unknown presence.

Derek doesn't bother knocking. He punches through the door, taking some of his stress out on the rotting wood. His hands heal while he follows the presence deeper into the house. The glow from a streetlight reaches the first floor, at least, but the ghost disregards this floor and moves onto the second. Derek can see nothing up there but black. He chooses his footing carefully on the stairs, but with the dim lighting his foot falls through the wood twice. Derek tries not to smell anything; the scent of old permeating through everything in the house. The further he walks, the more another scent cuts through it. He recognizes it, the smell of old blood and ozone, but does his best to ignore it.

In the middle of a hallway, freezing air urges him upward. There aren't anymore floors, and Derek takes a minute to breath deeply, so frustrated that his human nails break the skin of his palms. The presence won't stop hovering above him, so Derek takes out his phone to use as a flashlight. With it, he notices something his night vision couldn't pick up on before—an attic door on the ceiling. There's nothing to pull it down with, so Derek finds a stable chair to stand on and stabs his claws into the door. He tugs, but it's locked. Who the fuck locks their attic access? Derek yanks, and rips off half the door. He scratches the rest of the wood off in pieces and lifts himself into the attic.

Derek stops dead. The stench of blood overpowers any other scent in the attic. When he breathes through his mouth, it's worse; the air is so thick he imagines he can taste it. The air swirls around him like a whirlwind. The traveling chill over his body combined with the miasma of blood makes him dizzy. There's a window on one end of the attic, but the streetlight is on the opposite side of the house, and the sky is black with the new moon. Derek blinks, feeling helpless and blind. He pulls out his phone again, and shivers at what he sees. Blood markings coat the walls, magical symbols that Derek doesn't recognize. He moves his light around the room.

There's a body under the window. He fumbles his phone and it clatters to the floor. Derek's heart jackhammers. He knows that back, knows the curve of that spine, the nape of that neck. Through sheer willpower, Derek doesn't throw up. He takes careful, deliberate steps towards the body. He crouches down and gently flips the body over. Derek is shaking again.

“Stiles,” Derek chokes out. For the first time since Stiles went missing, he breaks down. Derek cradles his body and sobs, tears dripping onto Stiles. His grip is too tight, and his voice is too loud. Derek cries until he can't. And when he's finally exhausted, when he can't bear to cry anymore, to move from this spot, he freezes. A weak hand is running through his hair.

“Hey,” Stiles rasps, barely audible. “You found me.”

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this after staying up all night. It probably reads like Stiles is dead, because originally he was. I thought of the first line, Stiles calling Derek's name and then laughing, and the last line, which at the time was Derek pulling Stiles' dead body out of something (a well? a shallow grave?). Then I wrote some scenes in the middle. But when I got some sleep and read over it, I was like... shit. This is way too sad. I can't do this to Derek. So Stiles is alive at the end. (I still tagged it as major character death because it seems like he's dead, but if I shouldn't, or if there are some other tags I need to add, please tell me! Tagging is hard D:) This is one of the only stories I've written where I drafted almost all of it before writing.
> 
> If you're curious, my original skeleton draft ending took place right before the scene with Deaton, and was this:  
> "A burst of cold air surrounds him, and he feels the direction it seeps off to. Derek throws on his leather jacket and ties his shoes, then follows it out the door. He follows it to his car, and he follows it to an empty house. He breaks the door down to follow it inside. He follows it to a closet.  
> He turns the knob. He opens the closet door. Derek reaches out, grabs the arm—and pulls Stiles' dead body out. He cradles the body, drags his nose across Stiles' head, and sobs for the first time since he lost it."
> 
> My tired brain was like, "I want to make him pulling out the dead body worse and even more sad." My awake brain is suspicious that my tired brain has a secret serial killer life.
> 
> Anyway, thank you so much for reading! I love all of you <3


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